Thoughts on Fluid’s Dundjinni Mapper

I just saw an ad for Fluid’s new mapping/adventure creator program, Dundjinni, on the back of Dungeon Magazine yesterday.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, the Character Creator that shipped with the PHB 3.0 was probably the best such tool I ever used. On the other, eTools was … disappointing. It was buggy and underpowered compared to the open source PC Gen. Of course, Fluid did get screwed by Hasbro after the WotC take over, and it’s hard to say how many problems resulted from the radical re-tooling that was forced upon them. Ultimately, responsibility for fixing and updating eTools passed to Code Monkey, for reasons never fully explained.

Now there’s Dundjinni. It’s a combination mapper/adventure designer reminiscent of what Fluid had planned for the aborted Master Tools. The maps look simply gorgeous, combining photo-realistic graphics with a faint — but discernable — grid. Of course, they’ll probably cost me $60 to print on my inkjet printer. I didn’t see much on the site about the adventure designer component, but apparently it’ll allow you to import and edit statblocks, which can then be assigned to objects within maps.

The program’s written in Java, and while the initial version — scheduled for release in April — will run under Windows, they’re hoping to do Mac and Linux version as well. Obviously, as a Mac fan, that bit got my attention — the platform could certainly use a mapping utility like this.

There’s a Windows demo on the site, and once I’m able to wrest my PC laptop from my wife, I’m going to give it a whirl.

Sign up for RADIATIONS Newsletter

About Nuketown

Nuketown is a speculative fiction website that’s been published continuously since 1996.

It’s publishing focus is articles, reviews and editorials about science fiction, fantasy, and horror with heroic overtones. It covers a variety of topics within the speculative fiction genre, including games, movies, soundtracks, books, and websites.